Bold, Restless Experimentation

In his latest speech, invoking the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Michael Gove calls for bold, restless experimentation.

Although one of Gove's best known pronouncements was his statement during the Brexit campaign that people in this country have had enough of experts ..., Fraser Nelson suggests he never intended this to refer to all experts: he was interrupted before he could specify which experts he meant.

Many of those who share Gove's enthusiasm for disruptive innovation also share his ambivalence about expertise. Joe McKendrick quotes Valar Afshar of DisrupTV: If the problem is unsolved, it means there are no experts.

Joe also quotes Michael Sikorsky of Robots and Pencils, who links talent, speed of decision and judgement, and talks about pushing as much of the decision rights as possible right to the edge of the organization. Meanwhile, Michael Gove also talks about diversifying the talent pool - not only a diversity of views but also a diversity of skills.

In some quarters, expertise means centralized intelligence - for example, clever people in Head Office. The problems with this model were identified by Harold Wilensky in his 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, and explored more rigorously by David Alberts and his colleagues in CCRP, especially under the Power To The Edge banner.

Expertise also implies authority and permission; so rebellion against expertise can also take the form of permissionless innovation. Adam Thierer talks about the tinkering and continuous exploration that takes place at multiple levels, while Bernard Stiegler talks about disinhibition - a relaxation of constraints leading to systematic risk-taking.
 

Elevating individual talent over collective expertise is a risky enterprise. Malcolm Gladwell calls this the Talent Myth, while Stiegler calls it Madness. For further discussion and links, see my post Explaining Enron.

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Michael Gove, The Privilege of Public Service (Ditchley Annual Lecture, 27 June 2020)

Joe McKendrick, Artificial Intelligence May Bring More Management-Free Organizations (Forbes, 8 June 2020)

Henry Mance, Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove (Financial Times, 3 June 2016)

Fraser Nelson, Don't ask the experts (Spectator, 14 January 2017)

Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Press, 2019). Review by John Reader (Postdigital Science and Education, 2019).

Adam Thierer, Permissionless Innovation (Mercatus Center, 2014/2016)

Related posts: Demise of the Superstar (August 2004), Power to the Edge (December 2005), Explaining Enron (January 2010), Enemies of Intelligence (May 2010), The Ethics of Disruption (August 2019)

Five Elements of Responsibility by Design

I have been developing an approach to #TechnologyEthics, which I call #ResponsibilityByDesign. It is based on the five elements of #VPECT. Let me start with a high-level summary before diving into some of the detail.


Values

• Why does ethics matter?
• What outcomes for whom?

Policies

• Principles and practices of technology ethics
• Formal codes of practice, etc. Regulation.

Event-Driven (Activity Viewpoint)

• Effective and appropriate action at different points: planning; risk assessment; design; verification, validation and test; deployment; operation; incident management; retirement. (Also known as the Process Viewpoint). 

Content (Knowledge Viewpoint)

• What matters from an ethical point of view? What issues do we need to pay attention to?
• Where is the body of knowledge and evidence that we can reference?

Trust (Responsibility Viewpoint)

• Transparency and governance
• Responsibility, Authority, Expertise, Work (RAEW)

Concerning technology ethics, there is a lot of recent published material on each of these elements separately, but I have not yet found much work that puts them together in a satisfactory way. Many working groups concentrate on a single element - for example, principles or transparency. And even when experts link multiple elements, the logical connections aren't always spelled out.

At the time of writing this post (May 2019), I haven't yet fully worked out how to join these elements either, and I shall welcome constructive feedback from readers and pointers to good work elsewhere. I am also keen to find opportunities to trial these ideas on real projects.


Related Posts

Responsibility by Design (June 2018) What is Responsibility by Design (October 2018) Why Responsibility by Design Now? (October 2018)

The Quantum Organization

In road traffic, says my friend @antlerboy, the one with the most momentum has the most responsibility. Perhaps that's true in other fields too?

Meanwhile, in a hierarchical organization, the one with the highest position has the highest authority. This is known as positional power. Unfortunately, responsibility and authority are not the same thing. (The philosopher Robert Brandom talks about the asymmetry of responsibility and authority in terms of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic.)

According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum can be determined, and vice versa. This is one of the central principles of quantum mechanics.

An analogous problem in most organizations is that responsibility and authority are poorly aligned. In other words, the person who pulls the strings isn't always the one who gets the blame when something goes wrong. And similarly, the person who does the work isn't always the person who actually knows how to do it properly. Position versus momentum.

There is a useful technique for organizational analysis known as RAEW (responsibility, authority, expertise and work), which was described by Roger Crane in the 1980s and adopted in some versions of Information Systems Planning. Unlike better-known techniques for responsibility assignment such as RACI, which describe how responsibilities ought to be distributed in an ideal (linear, clockwork) organization, the RAEW technique allows us to analyse how (badly) responsibilities are distributed in a real (chaotic, quantum, snakepit) organization.

And maybe fix some of the problems?

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Simon Wardley: The vast majority of business tools that I see in use, fail to give you position and movement. I find them useless for context or learning. (April 8, 2016)

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Related Posts: Clockwork or Snakepit? (June 2010)

Robert Brandom, Interview, Summer 2008. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdIPuERVjk0 Transcript: http://www.filosofia.it/images/download/multimedia/08_Brandom%20Interview_transcription.pdf Archived 2014-11-11 at the Wayback Machine

I.G. Macdonald and R.A. Veryard, Modelling, Business Relationships in a non-Centralized Systems Environment, in A. Sölvberg, J. Krogstie and A.H. Seltveit (eds), Information Systems Development for Decentralized Organizations (IFIP Transactions; London: Chapman and Hall, 1995) 

Wikipedia: Master-Slave Dialectic, Responsibility Assignment Matrix, Uncertainty Principle.

Open University: Handy’s four types of organisational cultures

Updated 18 June 2020